mgh02114 writes: The new US stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was deployed for the first time to Asia earlier this month. The first flight from Hawaii to Japan was forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed the F-22 on-board computers as they crossed the international date line. The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported here and here, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that all every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii. According to the CNN story, if they had not been with their tankers, or the weather had been bad, this would have been serious. CNN has not put up anything on their website yet. This follows previous reports that a software bug in the F-16, caught in simulation before the plane ever flew, that would have caused the fighter to flip upside down when flying over the equator.

ctwxman writes: "I grew up on Devil Dogs. Alas, there's no Devil Dog book, but now there is one about Twinkies — nature's perfect food thanks to the miracle of modern science and advanced chemistry! "Why is it you can bake a cake at home with as few as six ingredients, but Twinkies require 39? And why do many of them seem to bear so little resemblance to actual food?" Pure goodness doesn't come easy. Steve Ettlinger is the author of "Twinkie, Deconstructed," the definitive Twinkie story... even without the official help of the keepers of the Twinkie secret. It's all summarized on MSNBC. Before clicking, make sure you have a glass of milk handy."

Posted
by
kdawsonon Sunday February 25, 2007 @02:26PM
from the desperate-for-housewives dept.

Astat1ne writes in with a story in The Register about the delays Australian TV viewers are experiencing getting overseas-produced series and how this is driving many of them to download the shows via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The problem is compounded by the fact that Australian viewers are unable to download legal copies of the episodes from the US iTunes website. Quoting: "According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series, Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first-run series first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months."

hcmtnbiker writes: Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 share a logic flaw. The issue is actually more severe, as the two versions of the Microsoft and Mozilla browsers are not the only ones affected. The vulnerability impacts Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, and Firefox 1.5.0.9.
"In all modern browsers, form fields (used to upload user-specified files to a remote server) enjoy some added protection meant to prevent scripts from arbitrarily choosing local files to be sent, and automatically submitting the form without user knowledge. For example, ".value" parameter cannot be set or changed, and any changes to.type reset the contents of the field," said Michal Zalewski, the person that discovered the IE7 flaw.
There are Proof of concepts for both IE7 and firefox

Roland Piquepaille writes: "If you live near the sea, chances are high that your home is built over sandy soil. And if an earthquake strikes, deep and sandy soils can turn to liquid, with some disastrous consequences for the buildings sitting on them. But now, U.S. researchers have found a way to use bacteria to steady buildings against earthquakes by turning these sandy soils into rocks. Today, it is possible to inject chemicals in the ground to reinforce it, but this can have toxic effects on soil and water. On the contrary, this use of common bacteria to 'cement' sands has no harmful effects on the environment. But so far, this method is limited to labs and the researchers are working on scaling their technique. Here are more references and a picture showing how unstable ground can aggravate the consequences of an earthquake."

Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Sunday February 25, 2007 @12:08PM
from the important-stuff-here-people dept.

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue's current issue on Open Source Security includes a short article by Eric Allman of Sendmail on how to handle security bugs in your code.
"Patch with full disclosure. Particularly popular in the open source world (where releasing a patch is tantamount to full disclosure anyway), this involves opening the kimono and exposing everything, including a detailed description of the problem and how the exploit works... Generally speaking, it is easier to find bugs in open source code, and hence the pressure to release quickly may be higher.""

athar writes: "The Canadian Supreme Court, in an unanimous 9-0 decision, struck down the security certificate regime in Canada, whereby foreigners could be detained indefinitely on the basis of secret evidence, with no real ability to challenge their detention. The Court ruled that the regime violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and has given the government one year to rectify the regime. The decision is in stark contrast to the current legal situation in the United States."

An anonymous reader writes: Matt Dillon has decided to develop a new filesystem from scratch to support DragonFly's clustering, rather than port an existing one. From his post: "There are currently two rough spots in the design. First, how to handle segment overflows in a multi-master environment. Such overflows can occur when the individual masters or slaves have different historical data retention policies. Second, where to store the regeneratable indexes."

Posted
by
kdawsonon Saturday February 24, 2007 @06:11PM
from the very-big-sharks dept.

s31523 writes "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has announced they have working in the lab a Solid State Heat Capacity Laser that averages 67 kW. It is being developed for the military. The chief scientist Dr. Yamamoto is quoted: 'I know of no other solid state laser that has achieved 67 kW of average output power.' Although many lasers have peaked at higher capacities, getting the average sustained power to remain high is the tricky part. The article says that hitting the 100-kW level, at which point it would become interesting as a battlefield weapon, could be less than a year away."

henrypijames writes: The intense effort by the fair-use community to circumvent AACS (the content protection protocol of HD DVD and Blu-Ray) has produced yet another stunning result: The AACS Device Key of the WinDVD 8 has been found, allowing any movie playable by it to be decrypted. This new discovery by ATARI Vampire of the Doom9 forum is based on the previous research of two other forum members, muslix64 (who found a way to located the Title Keys of single movies) and arnezami (who extracted the Processing Key of an unspecified software player). AACS certainly seems to be falling apart bit for bit every day now.

Vishal Mishra writes: "This is regarding a recent and very well written New York Times story on SlashDot, about Identity Thefts. While the story provides a lot of useful information, it also directs users to a search site developed by a company TrustedID, that can help people know if they have already been a victim of identity fraud. This site can potentially steal social security numbers by the way it collects SSN for verification against its database. The site does not use hashing at all, but instead requires customers to send SSN or credit card information unhashed. Here is a link to the blog describing the attack and the right secured way to build such search sites — http://vmtech.blogspot.com"

njondet writes: "Jobs' U-turn on DRMs has been received in France with a mix of disbelief from independent labels, defiance from the majors (whose largest member is French-owned Universal Music), and a hint of self-congratulation from the Culture Minister (picture, right) who argues that the new law will guarantee interoperability whether DRMs are dropped or not.
http://french-law.net/index.php?option=com_content &task=view&id=21&Itemid=1"

An anonymous reader writes: BitTorrent Inc announced that they will open their video store this Monday.

Movies will only be available for rental. Older titles will cost $2.99, while new releases will go for $3.99. Customers can take up to a month to watch a film. Once they start watching a title, they have up 24 hours to finish it. TV shows and music videos are "download to own" and cost $1.99 each.

All the content will be protected with Windows DRM, Ironically enough BitTorrent COO Ashwin Navin stated that DRM "will inspire people to pirate content".